


Rage Like A Red Giant Star

by Popchop



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Gen, down with the patriarchy, getting angry about stuff that happened on television thirty years before I was born, nothing motivates me like spite, shout out to bredfolk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-20 06:18:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10656672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Popchop/pseuds/Popchop
Summary: Screw abandoning Susan on Earth in 2150ish, that was awful and cruel and it cannot stand.





	Rage Like A Red Giant Star

Susan was hundreds of years old but still mostly a child when she was abandoned on Earth by her grandfather, wearing one shoe and the entirely useless key to the TARDIS around her neck, and her childish crush standing at her back fully expecting her to marry him and … till the land? Have his babies? Stay in one place until she died, never seeing her home or her people again? Never see the sun set from a different planet or meet another alien being?  
Fuck, no.   
Susan - who was coming into her full power but not quite there - let David lead her away, shocked, though that shock was soon to turn into fury. It took her two years to scavenge the right pieces from abandoned Dalek machinery to build a working spaceship. It was an ugly mishmash of parts and looked more Dalek then anything else, but she took a pot of paint and inscribed home in Gallifreyan over the door and it became home.   
This broken world was not her world, and these people were not her people, and she would not just be passed around like a piece of chattel from grandfather to fiancee. There would be a reckoning, sooner or later.  
On the day it was finished, she kissed David (who she now knew she could do much better than) goodbye, told him “It’s been fun!” and “settle down with a nice human girl” and set off to escape the gravity well.   
It took her about sixty years to make it back to Gallifrey, including fifteen years spent with the Ice Belt Pirates of Phagiro IV, which she left with a significant amount of treasure and the title of Pirate Queen, and when she got there it was to find that she had just missed her grandfather.   
Well, never mind, she thought. She kicked around the academy for a few years, found that they had very little to teach her, then decided that if the Doctor wasn’t coming back to Gallifrey for her to shout at him, she would just have to go find him first. Susan procured a TARDIS (stole is such an ugly word, but she learned from the best), and set off in search of him.   
She missed him six or seven times, arriving in one case less the a minute after he departed, and finally caught up with him on a desert planet on the edge of a system with a too-bright star. He was trying to do something with an atmospheric regulator for reasons and people she didn’t really care about at that moment, exactly. He was younger then he’d been, but still a little older then her, and she wasn’t sure where he was in his personal timeline but she was damn well going for it.   
His cheek made an excellent noise when she slapped it, and it almost relieved eighty years of spite, but not quite.   
“You bastard! You left me all alone on that fucking backwards planet - a full on patriarchal handover! Were you just waiting for a man to come along to hand me to?”   
“Uh -“   
“What the hell is your problem, Grandfather?”   
“Uh -“   
“Well?”   
“I’m… sorry?”   
“You’d damn well better be” she snapped. “And can you explain exactly why you’re sorry?”   
“I - uh, if I don’t get this atmospheric regulator going in the next few minutes -“  
“I don’t care about the atmospheric regulator” she said forcefully. “I want you to explain why you’re sorry”   
“Because… I shouldn’t have abandoned you…?” he said, a little uncertainly. “Uh. I shouldn’t have abandoned you without even talking to you or asking you what you wanted…?”   
“That’s a good start”  
“And that was wrong of me” he said. “It was very wrong of me and I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have treated you like you were a child or a possession to be handed off to someone else”  
“Right” Susan said, and rolled up her sleeves. “That’ll do. For now. Show me this atmospheric regulator”

**Author's Note:**

> shoutout to bredfriends and the classic who watch, you know who you are


End file.
